31 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Second Life, Virtual Worlds
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Pearl and one of her favorite old spectres, Borris, at the Black Rose Cafe.
One of the zombie infested graveyards in Legacies 1891
Last Halloween was the last Halloween in Legacies 1891 which is no more.
And levitating more recently from Calas Galadhon:
30 Tuesday Oct 2012
Posted in Second Life, Uncategorized
My room in the attic. There’s a communal bath tub behind the screen.
Most of the second floor is a common area for dining and sitting.
I’m shuffling things around to find time to join a Medieval role play. It isn’t an historically accurate Medieval roleplay; it’s just that we wear closer to Medieval looking clothing and the furnishings and weapons are way more Medieval than not. My female character is not illiterate and I’ll explain that by saying she fled a convent. Yes she traveled alone to another city, a city that has at least one dragon.
I love the sim build and have quite a few photos of it I haven’t shown here yet. It uses the LaRPs HUD and meter which I like and the sim owners are very kind, reliable and patient so far. I don’t want to get disappointed again so I’m not renting yet.
This will be my home when I begin. One of my buddies will be my cousin and he’s a Watch member; it’s his place. His office is on the first floor. I got to furnish most of the building, needing to keep it all under 150 prims. I find decorating very relaxing and it diminishes my real world compulsive shopping to nest my own home. (I have an interest in quirky art and antiques.)
I have several kinds of foods I can place on the table. There’s a pie on it now. I also have a bowl of apples, a jar of mead and some glasses and a plate of fresh baked bread.
While I was doing the shopping and placing of furnishings on Saturday, the sim builder brought in some foggy weather and it was very beautiful.
29 Monday Oct 2012
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My stone fence. Of course I’m proud of it and am not comparing it to what others can do.
28 Sunday Oct 2012
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These moving, floating cubes is my favorite installation.
It’s always good to rest, snack and stay hydrated.
27 Saturday Oct 2012
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25 Thursday Oct 2012
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After tweaking things with my pc and checking out my drivers for what was longer than I cared to spend, I had a successful visit to BURN2. It was interesting and I took some photos but didn’t take notes about anything. I just wanted to enjoy it and put this blog out of my mind.
What kept crossing my mind the most was seeing the installations and wanting to make my own. That was an unusual response, I thought, after a recent experience of creating three things in the Island Oasis virtual reality. Those objects took quite awhile and when you see the results, well…… they’re nowhere near the art at BURN2.
BURN2 is worth visiting and I hope you enjoy the photos. I’ll have a few more of them to share on the weekend.
24 Wednesday Oct 2012
Posted in Life, Second Life, Uncategorized
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I’ve made several attempts to attend BURN2 and my laptop, drivers and/or viewer can’t deal with it.
Maybe it’s because I have too much I want to do right now that made my joining the Darkmoon Isle roleplay sim take longer than I expected. There were glitches with the meter and my trying to fix it got me in deeper. Somehow the typing animation got turned on in my AO and it took me awhile to figure that out. As of now, I believe I’m set. Both my friend and the sim builder were patient and kind which is much appreciated.
It’s a medieval sim and I’m a peasant so I won’t have to be changing clothes a lot. I’ll mostly be my usual pleasant, friendly character. I just don’t feel like being mean although I’ve certainly had to deal with my exasperated feelings in real life. Many other people are feeling that same way too, I can tell. We’re being called to be more authentic which isn’t popular.
I see light at the end of the tunnel.
The photos were taken at Hobo Island during a visit Sunday evening. I’d been wishing I had building skills and quickly looked at a few areas listed in the destination guide as having resources.
23 Tuesday Oct 2012
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That’s Wren floating in the air. I haven’t taken any virtual reality photography classes and photography isn’t something I’m good at in real life. Floating in the air is the only way I knew how to get a snapshot here. Just because there are fabulously amazing photos of the Grand Canyon in existence doesn’t keep people from taking photos of their family there, right?
That’s the front of my cottage. I’ve put down about six one prim grass patches.
Here’s the back of the cottage. Some of the neighbors have nothing on their islands but palm trees and foliage so I have some good views. There are a few available islands near me and some with just a house plopped down as far as I can tell.
Front lawn. Wren is standing on the ground now.
This set had more nice pieces but I didn’t want to use the prim units.
I filled spaces with low-prim rugs, pictures and plants after I put in major furniture. Wren even has a washer and dryer which is good because she wears the same outfit every day.
There’s a Landmark Folder given with clubs, a nude beach, an airport and other places for those who like to socialize. There’s also a Shopping Center and a 9/11 Memorial. I could visit those places to blog about one of these days.
There are different size parcels of land for sale here and information about the tier structures readily available. I’ve also seen some really good, more detailed objects for those who can have 1000 prims on their property.
I’ve enjoyed this and it wasn’t too difficult to figure out so far. My viewer crashes a lot it seems and there’s awkwardness but I’ve felt surprisingly patient.
22 Monday Oct 2012
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These are some of the free houses I rezzed on my island in the virtual world of Island Oasis. It was the first time I’d ever rezzed a house or anything this large and some very odd things happened. They all needed to be unpacked; then when I rezzed them they would often land on my head causing me to sink into the sea when I tried to walk out from under them.
My first choice, the Tiki one used up almost all the prims and all the space. It had blinds that could be put up or down. Most of these houses don’t have doors yet, which is fine on an island.
Surprising to me, the one I chose is the top one, the windmill cottage. It is 85 prims of the 280 allotment. Actually when I read the object count in About Land it indicated 85 prims. Two are already there, maybe the rental box, so you have 278 to work with.
The Second House is the Loft House which is 85 prims also. I wasn’t able to figure out how to get up the stairs. There’s a wall sconce which is clickable and has hud options. I endured some silly disasters and will store the house for awhile.
The third house is the Victorian Lady which is 203 prims. That’s too many for my purposes here.
The fourth one would be my second choice and it’s only 65 prims. It has grunge graffiti on the outside which I wasn’t in the mood for but might very well use for variety sometime.
There’s also a log cabin, a garden house which was shown in the top photo yesterday and several others. These are available from the area where you join the IO group (activation of which allows you to rez) and where the rule signs are. There’s a photo in yesterdays post.
In the Mall are business buildings like a Spa, skating rinks and others which I don’t recall at the moment. The islands are residential only. I picked up a Spa building which is huge just to look at it rezzed.
I believe most of the staff is in Europe. There were more people here than I’d seen before at 5:00 a.m. SLT.
Tomorrow I’ll show photos of how I decorated.
21 Sunday Oct 2012
Posted in Second Life, Uncategorized
There’s no way I’m leaving Second Life soon. I’m only 14 months old there and this week I intend to visit BURN2 and join the Darkmoon Isle sim. I’ve very recently signed up for Island Oasis, another virtual reality site and I want to share that in case anyone’s interested.
Yesterday I set up my house, furnished it and I’m very pleased. I think this is going to take about 3 posts to show a lot of what I did and today I want to backtrack a little to the beginning.
In Second Life I use the latest version of their viewer. There’s a choice of viewers for Island Oasis and Hippo OpenSim is “best for Windows 7” so that’s the one I chose and it’s all right. The laptop I use for virtual reality is a European model with a better graphics card than my old Dell and IO doesn’t recognize it. But that hasn’t been a problem.
About my awkward avatar. She’s bits and pieces of a freebie. There are much more glamorous ones; I’ve seen them. The currency used is $Ps and I know nothing about the economy. There’s a way to convert $Ls into $Ps but it sounds too boring to figure out. I don’t have nearly enough readers to do boring things for this blog.
Anyway, I’ve never earned Lindens in SL; they’ve all been purchased so I was thinking it might be fun to get by on free stuff until I see how this works out and well….just to do it. There are free shops offered to those who make things to sell which I find very interesting but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. I really do have cognitive challenges, short term memory problems, etc. and this ought to be fun.
Yesterday was the first day I talked to anyone here. The owner fixed my error of renting an expired island with someone else’s things still on it. The first photo is a head shot of me (Wren Grey) in the garden house I was a squatter in for four days.
The prim returns on expired island rentals are done manually by the staff. I now have my own island and I picked up several free houses. I rezzed them one at a time to check out how many prims they had for the 280 limit; it was either that or trespass into neighbors houses to see what they look like.
I also furnished the house and landscaped the island, using 280 prims and I believe I did a great job. There is a mall where you can obtain a free avatar, clothes, shoes, jewelry, business buildings, poses, an AO, plants and really anything you might need. Almost all of it is made by an owner, Sugar Paolino.
I picked up a few modest outfits that cover Wren’s body and I’m glad they exist. I feel no hurry to fix up her appearance and am instead interested in learning to make things when I have some time. I feel less intimidated here. I toyed with the idea of leaving her slightly overweight and may do that at some point, although I believe in health as a way to model. I applaud people for who they are and what they accomplish with what they have to work with rather than appearance.
The restroom photo was taken in the Mall. It’s amusing to me when restrooms are made available for the comfort of our avatars. In Second Life there’s a fabulous one in the Age of England roleplay welcome area.
Here I was thrilled when Wren found a room full of free textures and later found a sandbox with instructions on signs around it. One of the staff friended me yesterday and has offered help if I have questions about building. I understand that he’s very busy as are most of the staff.
This whole beginner situation is something I missed in the early stages of SL since I came so very late to that party while the old timers were saying it’s dying.
I’ll need to make excellent use of my time if I’m going to do all I want to do for the next few months, inworld as well as real life. Please don’t suggest an intervention; overbooking, and over-commitment are my MO and I get more done than when I make “reasonable” schedules for a several month span of time.
Virtual Worlds are a healthy pastime for me as it isn’t critical in the way my real life projects and concerns are.
Tomorrow I’ll show photos of about five of the houses I picked up and tell a little about them. If you’ve read this far, thank you very much!
